Art exhibition listings

By Noah Buchan / Staff reporter

Ju Ming (朱銘) returns to Kalos Gallery with Citizen (市民), a series of 80 human-scale wood sculptures that form part of the Living World Series (人間木雕系列), a long-term art project begun in 1981 that has as its focus the people and society of Taiwan. The exhibition portrays ordinary city dwellers from all walks of life. The unpainted and rough-textured sculptures express the diversity of humanity and, in their majestic grandeur, suggest the extraordinary aspects of ordinary people in everyday life.

Orientations (方向) showcases new and old paintings by Jorinde Jankowski (張友鷦), whose canvases vary in subject matter and style. In her vaguely monochromatic cityscapes, she depicts the isolation and fragmentation of urban life, delineating an all too common alienation as a symbol for human longing. In other paintings, she employs a vibrant palette of color and cartoon-like, personified animal figures to mock human flaws, while in other canvases she becomes more introspective and investigates the meaning of home, family and belonging with fairytale-like images that possess dark undertones.

Contemporary Chinese artist, Shi Jinsong (史金淞), works in sculpture, painting, and on-site experiential performance, and uses non-traditional easel-painting forms to express his concern for the transitory nature of life and its objects. With Scenes from an Unpredictable Theatre, Shi uses theatrical elements as the artistic medium for his new exhibition, which is in two parts. The first involved Shi traveling throughout Taiwan over the past few months, collecting everyday objects and returning them to the gallery, where an invited audience was encouraged to smash them using a variety of hammers. The artist will, over the coming weeks, use the detritus — what he dubs “a script” — to form an installation, which he calls “a play,” which will be on view in the gallery until May.

Experimental sound installations and live performances make up a solo exhibition by Chang Yung-ta (感知‧交界). Entitled Seen/Unseen (張永達), Chang transforms invisible signals and data — radiation from a nuclear power plant, for example — into sound waves, which serve as the primary objects of his installations. The two pieces present the conversion of visible things to invisible sounds, or the conversion of something visual into something auditory, which is meant to convey a looming yet silent message.

■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), Taipei National University of the Arts (台北藝術大學), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei City (台北市學園路1號). Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm. Tel: (02) 2896-1000 X2432

■ Until Feb. 24

Huang Pei-ju (黃珮如) continues her exploration of light and darkness as a metaphor of liminality with Reduced to Light (躲進光裡面). Huang uses pen to create various wash effects on the canvas, which are meant to suggest a visible contour to light.